A while back, my husband K— lost his job due to a work slowdown.  Far from being a disaster, it had a real upside to it.  To my surprise and delight, K— underwent a sort of flowering of domestic consciousness, an awakening of long-dormant nesting instincts.  In fact, him getting laid off turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened in my life.  In the first two weeks he was jobless, I came home to find the floors vacuumed, the litter boxes changed, a home cooked meal on the table, the bicycles tuned up, the trash taken out, papers organized, and more.  We lost an income, but I gained a wife.  I still think it was a bargain.

I realized quickly that he was doing all those things to prove that he wasn’t just sitting around all day watching As the World Turns and reruns of Friends.  I didn’t need the proof, but I was thrilled.  His own pride had turned him into the husband every woman wants: a househusband.

Househusbands, like unicorns, are rare animals.  The media would have you believe that there are more and more of them all the time, but reports of househusbands are inflated.  Even statistics suggesting that men are just pulling more of their own weight around the house are suspicious.  For instance, there’s one poll saying that there’s only an hour difference per week between the time men and women spend doing household chores.  That’s because most guys do chores the way K— does: at 7:00 pm he washes a dish, gets a song stuck in his head, goes to play it on the guitar, returns to the sink half an hour later but the water is cold so he runs new hot water, then the phone rings and he talks for half an hour, the phone is by the computer and he starts web surfing absent-mindedly while he’s talking, when he hangs up the phone he’s at a cool site where he spends an hour, he comes to tell me all about it, I’m in the bedroom where he remembers that he’s got laundry to do, he takes the laundry to the basement where he gets distracted by a shop project, etc. etc.  He finally returns to the sink and does the last dish at around 11:00 pm and then claims he spent four hours washing dishes.  According to a man’s calculation of his own “chore hours,” a househusband would spend 302 hours a day doing chores—clearly a factual impossibility.

I think the reality is a little more like another story I read.  A man’s wife complained that she was too tired to have sex because of all the housekeeping she had to perform after work.  Her husband’s solution?  He hired a maid.  “Great,” I thought to myself, “now they both have to work longer hours to pay for the maid!”  Guys just don’t get it.  Or maybe they do get it, and that’s the problem.

Alas, K—’s own experiment in househusbandry is a case in point.  Like the fragile blossom to which I compared it, his enthusiasm for domesticity soon faded.  By the time the Winter Olympics rolled around, he was plotting elaborate ways to avoid the chores he’d done out of guilt during those first few halcyon weeks of unemployment.  As we sat down to the twelfth night of Olympic curling (you’d think it was the world’s most popular sport based on the number of broadcast hours devoted to it), he had a brilliant idea.  Since curlers obviously can’t get enough of their sport (even if spectators can), he proposed that we invite all the Olympic curling teams over to our house for a meet.  He planned to slide a stone across the floor in the hope that “someone might sweep around here.”

And too, as time went on, his emphasis seemed to shift away from finding himself a job and toward finding me a higher-paying job.  His hints got more and more blatant.  One day a friend came to visit driving a nice Audi.  Hearing that the Audi was actually his wife’s car and that his wife is a corporate vice president, K— remarked to me, “It sure would be nice if you were a vice-president.”  “Sure, hon,” I said.  “I’ll just check the want ads.  Let’s see…would that be under ‘vice?’”

And then there was this topper: one day, out of the blue, K— said, “I wonder if anyone has ever placed a personals ad that reads, “Will do whatever you want for money.”  “Were you thinking of putting an ad like that in the paper?” I responded jokingly.  “Actually,” he answered, “I was hoping you might.”  He mimicked reading aloud his imaginary ad: “Need cash to support lazy husband.  No reasonable offer refused.”  Pause.  “No unreasonable offer refused.”

It was obvious that my days enjoying the fruits of his guilt were numbered.  When a job offer loomed, he lunged.  He’d discovered what everyone does who keeps house—it’s awful!—and he needed a legitimate reason to stop.  You’ve never seen someone so happy to leave on a morning commute.  I, on the other hand, fondly recall his unemployed days, when all it took was a meaningful glance at the feather duster before hi-hoing it off to work for me to find something pleasantly clean at the end of the day.

K—’s flirtation with househusbandry was brief and beautiful, like a summer romance.  It may have been short, but it was real, and for one magical winter, I knew what it was like to capture a unicorn.